The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A service processor (SP) or a baseboard management controller (BMC) refer to a specialized microcontroller that manages the interface between system management software and platform hardware. The SP can be embedded on the motherboard of a computer, generally a server. Thus, different types of sensors can be built into the computer system, and the SP reads these sensors to obtain parameters such as temperature, cooling fan speeds, power status, operating system (OS) status, etc. The SP monitors the sensors and can send alerts to a system administrator via the network if any of the parameters do not stay within preset limits, indicating a potential failure of the system. The administrator can also remotely communicate with the SP to take some corrective action such as resetting or power cycling the system to get a hung OS running again.
However, there are computer systems or servers with no space available for a physical SP or BMC on the server hardware due to high number of systems packed within a small chassis. For example, some computer systems have packed hardware with all existing hardware elements embedded therein, and modification of the existing hardware elements is difficult and may be destructive to the computer system. In this case, a virtual service processor (VSP) can provide a suitable solution. The VSP is a unique piece of software stack which works below the actual OS used on the server. The VSP virtualizes a complete SP or BMC hardware and the functionality while no physical SP or BMC hardware is present on the system. Running on the in-band space on the processor of a server, the VSP offers a comprehensive manageability which is consistent across all other traditional server management solutions.
Generally, for a computer system using the VSP to virtualize the SP functionality, the VSP is installed in the computer system in the form of a hypervisor, which a hardware virtualization techniques allowing more than one operating system (OS), termed guests, to run concurrently on a host computer. After installing the hypervisor together with the VSP, one or more OS may be installed to the computer system to serve as the guest OS. Thus, in operation, the computer system runs the hypervisor together with the VSP software directly, and the hypervisor runs the OS and manages the execution the OS. In other words, the hypervisor is a virtual operating platform of the OS.
However, for a “headless” computer system, i.e. a computer system with no monitor, keyboard, or mouse, the user typically cannot install the VSP manually to the headless computer system. An example of the headless computer system is a headless server connected to a network, which is remotely accessible by the administrator from a client machine. Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need still exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.